Well, I just got back from the event and I’m now I’m sitting on my couch about to sum it all up.
About 14 people showed up to the event and everyone was contributing and the discussion never got stale. We talked about a lot of things: IUI, provisioning codes, 3-inches of love (don’t ask), appstore – and two ways of getting into it, disk IO, and even went through an exmaple app in objc.
An interesting thing to note came up which I wasn’t aware of; When filling out the tax information on your app store application, choose ITIN and use “nine zeroes” as the number. Apparently Canadian citizens are exempt and don’t need to fill out the huge forms asking you almost everything, stopping short of your blood type.
There was talk about how to deploy your app. App store or ad hoc method? If you go through the app store method, there were some obvious benefits – however if you’re just wanting to hack and release to a few (hundred) people or so, ad hoc was the way to go. Why? App store has a huge amount of gates (review process, etc) and Apple can essentially reject your application for a variety of reasons – “We don’t like it” might just be valid enough. If you go ad-hoc, you can deploy onto anyone’s iPhone, but you’ll need their iPhone GUID and bake it into your app first, creating a new binary for that user to download and only then will it install.
Something that irked me, interpreted languages are NOT supported on the iPhone! Now, I don’t know if this is something that will change in the future, but I have to think that it must. I can’t see, and I’ll loosely call it, “fun integration” with web API’s etc consumable by objc alone. I could do a lot of things really fast in script (fast as in development time), it would be laborious to code up equivalent in straight objc. I dare not speak about my work on an “unnamed” browser platform in C++.. linking times is absolutely killing me, but I digress.
Last note is the book of choice was “iPhone SDK Development
by Bill Dudney, Chris Adamson, Marcel Molina”. I haven’t seen it myself, but I might have to get myself a copy (currently available as a betaPDF). First time I’ve heard of a book being in “Beta”…
Funniest comment of the night came when we were debugging some sample code (who code owner will remain anonymous): “Umm, aren’t you leaking those strings?”… “Yeah, every second.”
If you deploy something adhoc, can Apple still flip the kill switch or would that only work on App Store deployed apps?
Apparently Apple still has the kill switch. The example given was the guy who tried getting approval for the app store and was rejected. He then deployed adhoc, thus avoiding the app store but now incurs the laborious task of building binaries for everyone. I sure hope he scripts that.
when’s the next one?
I’ll try to get a hold of Gord and see if/when he’d like to do another one soon. I quite liked it – I got my pyobjc app to compile and run finally!!
I would love to organize another, especially ones where we can get into some coding hackfests to get used to XCode and all that magical sugary goodness that Josh talks about…
PM me and we can talk, perhaps a short meetup for coffee/etc to figure out how to make something a bit more solidified and organized.
awwww man i cant wait for the next Iphone its going to be awesome i just know it!
” I got my pyobjc app to compile and run finally!!”
Mark,
Is that mean we can run Python Scripts on iPhone. Can you please share your wisdom
Thanks
Ravi
Iphone currently (most likely in the future) does not support interpreted languages to be run on it. I believe the main reason why is that it’s too much of a security problem.
Don’t know if anyone is interested but Apple is now offering iPhone’s that don’t require a 2 year contract.
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/tec_at_t_iphone
Of course the catch is it costs about $600
I am wondering if I should give up on my blackberry and change it to Iphone…both are good but I can’t have both!
The Apple rumor mill is once again running overtime on the topic of netbooks. If you believe the reports, Steve Jobs is himself leading the charge. My take: Whatever Apple does, it won
Hey Mark
can you direct me to anywhere that confirms that Canadian developers can bypass the horrible tax registration stuff as you described in the second paragraph?
Hi Dan,
Please see the last post in this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9191027